Tech disasters… or how to avoid them.

May 10, 2013

I was thinking about what I would do if my computer died… Panic! You see, lately it’s been heating up and it crashes as a consequence – it would appear that the fan might need a little cleaning. This of course worries me as I do not want it to suffer irreparable damage. I use it for everything: talking to my husband and family on Skype, keeping connected to my friends on Facebook, it’s a life line. I use it to write the blog posts you normally read, edit the photos that go along with them and read everyone else’s – a connection to the world. On top of that it’s what I use to listen to music and watch the films or series that rock me to sleep every night. An inseparable companion isn’t it?

That got me thinking about what I could do to keep my best friend working well and steps to salvage data, in case it fails. First of all the basic protection would be to have a firewall and anti virus protection (like Norton, for example). Then the most important thing is backing up data. I have a couple of external hard drives where I store my music, films and photos – I have too many gigabytes of information that I don’t want to lose on a computer meltdown! You can also use a cloud service to backup the most important things, like your photos (external hard drives can fail too). There is a decent article about that from PC World here. As far as backup goes, I would also recommend you get a backup service for your blog – remember my nightmare back in March? It as lucky that my friend Sandrine had all the subscription emails in her inbox, but we can’t rely on luck if we are doing things properly. In my case, Jorge, who designed the blog and put it all together, used a backup plugin for WordPress, that sends my info to my Google Drive.

So that’s it, this is what I do to keep my computer and data safe. Do you have any other suggestions?

In case you got bored with all the tech talk, here’s something I wore a while ago:

Hello, nice to meet you!

Sara Doucette is a frequent blogger and an occasional illustrator. She spends 50% of time daydreaming of art projects and petting random cats on the street and the other 50% documenting it all on Instagram.